On 30 June 2026, Donald Trump's annual financial disclosure reported more than $1 billion in crypto-related income for 2025, the single largest source of his personal earnings that year. Most of it traced back to two things: licensing fees tied to the $TRUMP memecoin and token sales connected to World Liberty Financial.
Here is the detail that matters more than the headline. The $TRUMP token itself is down roughly 97 percent from the peak it reached just after its launch in January 2025. The income came from issuing and licensing tokens, not from the tokens rising in value. That gap, a billion dollars booked while the flagship asset collapsed, is a clean illustration of something crypto insiders take for granted and newcomers usually miss.
The machinery underneath the disclosure is what matters here: token issuance, dollar-pegged stablecoins, on-chain settlement. It is the same plumbing that every Polymarket trade runs on. For anyone who wants to use prediction markets seriously, that plumbing is not a sideshow. It is the entry point.
Why prediction markets run on crypto
Start with the mechanical reality. Polymarket does not hold your money in a company bank account and pay you out later. Every position is a token you own in a wallet, and every trade is a settlement between wallets recorded on a public blockchain called Polygon. The unit of account is a stablecoin: Polymarket settles in pUSD, a token backed one-for-one by USDC, itself a dollar-pegged stablecoin. You fund with USDC, you see prices in dollars, and the token layer does the moving in the background.
The word that matters there is stablecoin. A memecoin like $TRUMP is designed to be volatile, and it behaved exactly as designed, spiking and then shedding almost all of its value. A stablecoin is engineered to do the opposite: hold a value of one dollar, whatever the rest of the market is doing. That is not an investment product. It is a settlement rail, the crypto equivalent of the pounds or dollars a bank moves when you tap a card. The distinction between those two kinds of token is the whole point of this piece, and the Trump disclosure is a useful way to see it, because it contains both stories at once, a fortune made from issuance sitting right next to a price that fell 97 percent.
This is why crypto is unavoidable on Polymarket rather than optional. There is no debit-card top-up on the international platform and no bank-transfer deposit that skips the token layer. If you want to place a position, you have to hold the stablecoin, which means you have to touch crypto rails at least once. Our explainer on how Polymarket works covers the order book and resolution mechanics in full; the point here is narrower and more practical: the rails are the cost of entry, and they are worth understanding before you fund anything.
What crypto access actually unlocks
The reason to bother is breadth. The two venues most people compare are Kalshi and Polymarket, and the split between them is largely a story about rails.
Kalshi is the CFTC-regulated United States venue. You fund it in dollars through ordinary bank rails, there is no crypto step, and the trade-off is a narrower product: a compliant, domestic-facing list of markets. Polymarket is the crypto-native venue. It settles in stablecoins on-chain, it is global rather than US-domestic, and it carries a far wider range of markets, including politics, geopolitics, international events and culture that a regulated US exchange will not list. Our full Polymarket versus Kalshi breakdown walks through the differences properly.
The honest summary is that using both gives you the fullest coverage, and the price of Polymarket's half of that coverage is learning the crypto rails once. There is now also a separately regulated US pathway for Polymarket built after its QCEX acquisition, which our guide on how Polymarket's regulated US access works explains; for most international users, though, the crypto-native product is still the one they will actually use, and USDC is still the key that opens it.
Getting on the rails with Crypto.com
If you have never bought a stablecoin before, the first step is an exchange that will sell you USDC and let you move it out to your own wallet. A common starting point for UK and international users is Crypto.com, which is a registered cryptoasset business with the FCA and also holds an electronic money institution licence, so it can handle ordinary pound deposits and withdrawals alongside the crypto side.
At a high level the path is short. You open an account, complete identity verification, which is the standard know-your-customer check every regulated exchange runs, buy USDC with your deposited funds, and then withdraw that USDC to a wallet you control. From there it goes to Polymarket. Expect the verification to take somewhere between a few minutes and a day depending on demand, and expect a small network fee when you move tokens out.
Deliberately, that is the overview and not the keystroke-level guide, because the mechanics of the deposit, the specific wallet, and the network to withdraw on deserve their own walkthrough. Our step-by-step on funding a Polymarket account with USDC covers the full sequence, and it is the piece to have open when you actually do this for the first time. The one habit worth building early: buy the exact token you need, which is USDC, rather than a volatile coin you then have to convert.
The editorial take
Come back to the 97 percent. The clearest lesson in the Trump disclosure is not about any one person's balance sheet. It is that a crypto token's price and a crypto token's usefulness are two entirely separate things. The $TRUMP memecoin generated enormous licensing income and still lost almost all of its market value, because it was a speculative asset and speculative assets can evaporate. USDC works as prediction-market money for the exact opposite reason: it is built not to move.
Treat crypto here as a tool, not a bet. You are not buying USDC hoping it appreciates; you are holding it because it is the settlement layer a particular class of market happens to run on. Prediction markets are one legitimate, non-speculative reason to learn these rails, and if you approach them that way, the crypto part stops being intimidating and starts being what it actually is: infrastructure. The point of this guide is not to talk you into any token. It is to make sure that when you fund a market, you know exactly which kind of crypto you are touching and why.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use Polymarket without crypto?
No. The international Polymarket platform settles every position on-chain in a USDC-backed stablecoin, and there is no debit-card or bank-transfer route that skips that step. To trade, you have to hold the stablecoin, which means moving through crypto rails at least once. That is a genuine change from a normal betting deposit, and it is the single most common reason new users bounce off during onboarding.
Why not just use Kalshi and avoid crypto entirely?
You can, and for some traders that is the right call. Kalshi is CFTC-regulated, funded in dollars through bank rails, and needs no crypto at all. The cost is range: its market list is narrower and US-domestic. Polymarket's breadth, especially in politics, geopolitics and international events, is what you are paying the crypto entry cost to reach. Many people who take prediction markets seriously end up using both.
Is Crypto.com regulated in the UK?
Crypto.com is registered with the FCA as a cryptoasset business, which covers anti-money-laundering and identity-verification obligations, and it separately holds an electronic money institution licence that lets it handle pound deposits and withdrawals. That is a stronger regulatory footing than an unregistered offshore exchange, though it is worth knowing the UK is in the middle of moving to a broader cryptoasset licensing regime over the next couple of years.
What happens if crypto prices move while I am holding USDC?
Very little, by design. USDC is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar and backed by dollar-denominated reserves, so it is engineered to stay at about one dollar regardless of what Bitcoin, Ether or any memecoin is doing. That is precisely why prediction markets settle in it rather than a volatile coin. Holding USDC to fund a market is not the same kind of exposure as buying crypto to speculate on its price.